After the 2018 Camp Fire tore through Paradise and neighboring areas, claiming at least 85 lives and displacing 50,000 people, some older residents from that region relocated to Carson City, Nev., and nearby locations.

Months later, Dr. Elizabeth Haase, medical director of psychiatry at Carson Tahoe Hospital and Behavioral Health Services and a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance — a group of mental health professionals raising awareness of the effects of climate change on mental health — said she observed worsening health, including exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rapid progression of dementia in some of the older people who had relocated from the Camp Fire zone.

“People can have a very dramatic decrease in their overall mental and physical health that’s connected to one of these climate events — that is likely to get missed, in terms of the association,” Haase said. One of her older patients developed pneumonia in addition to worsening of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized for several months, she said. Her patient’s mental health also deteriorated.

“In offering her the understanding — because I’m somebody that knows about climate and health — that what was happening to her now is linked to her experience in the fire was actually quite therapeutic for her,” she said. “And you know, a lot of sort of depressive and grief-related symptoms came out. And we were able to talk a little bit about what it means to be in your 70s and lose your home with absolutely no possibility, financially, of rebuilding.”

Like Haase, mental health experts based in the San Francisco Bay Area are exploring the ensuing physical, mental and emotional effects of climate change. Dr. Robin Cooper is co-founder and president of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She also has a small private practice in the city.

Cooper spoke with the San Francisco Public Press about what needs to be done locally to address climate change’s mental health toll. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working as a psychiatrist for decades, and in recent years, you’ve been exploring the threats of climate change to mental health. What got you interested in this field?

I have always been, outside of my professional endeavors, an activist. At the time that I began to learn about and think about and be introduced to the issues of climate change, it had that — “Wake up! Oh my God, this is a potential existential threat.” Once knowing about something that profound, I can’t turn myself away from it. And I began to be active in a number of organizations that were addressing climate change in its broader sense. But as I began to discover, I could use my voice most effectively in the realm that’s close to my work. So, I began to be involved much more in the health impacts of climate change.

A lot was being said about the general broad range of health impacts, but at the end of a talk, a pulmonologist or cardiologist or infectious disease person would say, “Oh, by the way, there’s some mental health impacts.” And I was shocked. I said, “Oh my God, we should be talking about that. We need to be the experts on that.” I met other likeminded psychiatrists, but our voice was very, very tiny at that time. And we came together with the idea that this was something we needed to take ownership of, know more about and be able to speak to it.

Could you describe how climate change affects the mental health of older adults?

So, you and I are both Californians, we know about the Paradise fire. Paradise was a community that had a large number of retirees. It was affordable. It was a place where people could go after years of living in other communities, buy a home that was going to be their place of retirement and live up the rest of their lives. The massive loss of their homes, their community, the place that they could live. These are people who retired, they’re on fixed incomes, who lost everything. So, when you lose your home, and you don’t have a lot of economic resources for rebuilding, you really have secondary emotional impacts. And so, where do you live? The loss of your social support — the greater level of poverty that you live out the rest of your life — interferes with the ability to make choices. And that has huge emotional impacts with depression, post-traumatic stress and a greater vulnerability.

If we look at the disasters that happened in Puerto Rico [in 2017 following Hurricanes Irma and Maria], particularly, the elderly were left on their own. They had no access to medications. Young people had gone to the U.S. mainland for jobs. So, the elderly were left on their own with little to help them recover. And those have huge implications for their emotional wellbeing and their physical wellbeing.

As extreme weather events continue to increase, what should local governments, hospitals, nonprofits and other organizations that are providing services to older people be doing now to strengthen the mental health infrastructure?

We’re in a big crisis, as you know, in health care delivery. We need to make changes in our health care delivery as we confront the vast kinds of troubles that people are going to experience from climate change. And that means shifting to funding and providing care in a more public health, community health manner using population-based ways of intervening. It means that the governmental agencies and those who pay for health care have to do that in a different way.

It also means empowering people in communities to do that before there are extreme heat waves and disasters. It means tightening up our neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, particularly for the elderly. That’s incredibly important, because they can be isolated, left alone, not able to care for themselves. If we have a public health model, and a model based on connectivity in communities, we can have partnerships. We can have buddy systems so Joe knows that Mrs. Smith, who is 86 years old and in her home, is alone and knows what she needs, and has someone to bring her to cooling centers, or help modulate continuing her medications as these disasters and climate events emerge.

Let me just give you another little example. Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the Eastern seaboard with ferocious impacts. Elderly people in this particular public housing that I’m aware of were stuck in their apartments for days without food, light or ability to get out because of the elevators not working. And then people came to the door. And they didn’t know if they were safe. They didn’t know if those were intruders who were going to hurt them, or people there to help them. It doesn’t have to be that way if we take care of some of these things before.

UCSF launched a climate change and mental health task force in June 2019. What did the group set out to do and what has it accomplished, especially for older people?

I would say our achievements have been in the realm of educating mental health trainees about the impacts of climate change in mental health. I believe that medical students need to be what we call climate literate in their educational endeavors. How can we train doctors, and anyone in health care, adequately, if we don’t train them to think about the most significant threat to our wellbeing of this century?

That task force is now being integrated more into this campuswide center on climate health and equity, which actually is a UC-wide endeavor that the Office of the President has supported that is multi-campus, although it’s primarily based at UCSF. I will say it is profoundly underfinanced.

Are you aware of other projects like that in the Bay Area?

There are things happening at many institutions, not with creating a task force, but other kinds of things. Stanford has a new faculty position for one person in the Department of Psychiatry to embed climate change and mental health into their department. Davis has a number of people who are exploring and doing research. But I will say to you, all of these things are siloed. Coming together is a really big issue in the realm of climate and mental health.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, last month sounded the alarm about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S., and how social isolation has a detrimental effect on the health of older people. And climate disasters could worsen this disconnection, especially if older adults are displaced from their homes and communities. So, on a local level, what steps can be taken to alleviate the loneliness crisis?

I think it is enhancing recreational, social meal programs that bring people outside of their homes and engage them with each other in socially involved activities. We know that caregivers are so underpaid, and that there’s been a massive loss in numbers of people who are doing caregiving for the elderly, because you can’t make a living off of it. We have to fund caregivers, so that those who are isolated in their homes have regular connection.

Given all the challenges and complexities of investigating and implementing solutions to address climate change’s toll on mental health, what gives you hope for the future?

Hope is a funny word. Hope is not optimism. Hope is not like, “I can see our way out of this.” We are going to have very, very significant, enduring, unrepairable damage from the impact of climate change. What gives me hope is this new way of defining hope — radical hope. I can envision a better world to live in. And when I see what’s happening, I can’t turn away from it, I have to lean into it. And some people are saying now, hope is a verb we create out of the activism that we do to confront our wicked problem. And what we do now is not going to make this all nice and better, but it will affect the kind of world that we’re moving toward in the future.

This Q&A, part of a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

See also:

• “Research on Climate Change and Health Reveals Risks for Older Adults: A Q&A With Dr. Andrew Chang,” 1/27/2023
• “Battling Despair Over a New Climate Change Reality,” 9/14/2021

The post Climate Change Can Harm Mental Health of Older Adults appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Against this backdrop and with extreme weather events on the rise, physician-researchers like Dr. Andrew Chang, an attending physician specializing in cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, are investigating how the biological mechanisms of aging and a warming world will affect the health of older adults.

In 2022, Chang and his colleagues examined medical literature to study the intricate and nuanced ways that climate change-fueled disasters and other environmental factors influence the cardiovascular health of older people. They summarized their findings in the journal Current Cardiology Reports. In an interview with the San Francisco Public Press, Chang shared some of the concerns expressed by older patients during environmental disasters like wildfires, and explained the challenges researchers often face while gathering data on this subject.

Below are excerpts from the interview, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What was the motivation for you and your colleagues to embark on researching the health impacts of climate change specifically on older adults?

In the immediate phase, the group of people who most suffers from the effects of climate change are our older adults and some of our senior citizens, and the reason for that is sort of twofold. First is, there are pretty unique biological changes that happen to the human body with aging, which actually increase the susceptibility to environmental factors. And the second thing is, there are social factors as well which make older adults less resilient against some of these events. So not surprisingly, if you look at the casualty rates from both natural disasters, as well as long-term exposures to things like air pollution, disproportionately, it is older adults who are dying from some of these conditions or developing conditions or suffering from the effects of these things. I think, very quickly, it became clear to us that the study of climate change’s effects on human health disproportionately involves the health of our older adults.

Wildfires are an ongoing concern here in the Bay Area as well as across the state. And your article explored the relationships between climate change and wildfires and cardiovascular risk for older people. Could you explain how they are linked?

The biggest thing is that older adults don’t have the same barrier functions that younger adults and younger people do. And what I mean by that is that most of the injury that happens from wildfire smoke is from inhalation. So, you breathe in particles, and particulate matter we know is highly inflammatory, and it enters your body. It enters the circulation through the tiny blood vessels called capillaries that are inside of your lungs. Older adults don’t have barrier functions at those blood vessels that are as robust as younger adults. So, you kind of have more of a leaky effect, where more of those toxins are absorbed. And then they enter into the bloodstream. 

Now, not only are more toxins coming in, there’s underlying susceptibility. There’s just the normal process of aging that causes us to have reduced lung capacity. If you imagine that we’re already starting out with reduced lung capacity as an older adult, then losing even more of that is more dangerous. Similarly, just due to normal aging processes, the heart muscle becomes stiffer, the arteries are less elastic. So, any of these toxic effects basically become magnified. 

And then on top of all of that, of course, older adults are more likely to have preexisting cardiopulmonary diseases — things like heart failure or high blood pressure or diabetes — and all of those things work additively or multiplicatively in terms of your injury from air pollution exposure.

Were there any other particularly startling or surprising findings that you came across as you were doing this research?

I was really surprised how so many of the deaths that are attributable to heat waves or heat events were actually cardiac rather than things coded as heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Because, I guess in my head, it had seemed that the actual exposure to the heat itself was probably going to be the biggest determinant of injury. As a clinical cardiologist, it kind of reinforced to me that heat-related injury for older adults is a cardiac problem.

Were there any challenges that you and your team experienced as you were working on this paper? Did you run into any hurdles in finding data about how climate change will affect the elderly population?

The paper that you’re referencing is … our synthesis of what the entirety of the literature looks like. In terms of data, our group also does a lot of primary research using primary sources of data. In general, in those situations, there are some challenges. One of them is that a lot of exposures tend to be gradual, over long periods of time. Things like air pollution, for example, we know climate change makes air pollution worse. But everyone experiences some amount of air pollution at baseline. So, there’s a challenge of studying something that’s sort of insidious, and occurring over a long period of time, in terms of things like air pollution. 

On the flip side, studying things like wildfires or extreme heat events, which are very intense, very short exposures. Part of that is also challenging because it’s hard to gather data in the moment. When there is a natural disaster, say like a wildfire, the priority on the ground really is to evacuate people. It’s to make sure that they’re being safe, that they’re being cared for. And a lot of research ends up happening retrospectively, trying to kind of go back and cobble together what exactly happened. So, you start to lose some of that individual granularity. 

You can gather much more granular data. For example, some of my colleagues are putting air sensors in people’s homes and looking forward to future wildfire seasons to see how much does that impact their health outcomes. The challenge on that side is also that’s very granular data that tends to be kind of hard and expensive to do on a large scale. 

And are you currently doing any research?

I’ll speak more generally, just because these studies are ongoing. But some of the questions that we’re interested in generally are: What were the effects of specific wildfire seasons on emergency room visits? Did emergency room visits for certain types of conditions — say, asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes — change before and after specific wildfire events? 

Other things we’re looking at are things like subclinical markers. What I mean by subclinical markers is: Is there an early detection system for injuries to the organs from these insidious, prolonged exposures? To give you an example, I look at ultrasound data of the heart in older adults — people over 65 — to look at over the course of five years or so of air pollution exposure. Are there subtle findings like subtle changes that happen to the way the heart moves? The way the heart muscle moves that may mean worse things are down the line? Can we identify these things early on? Can we identify people who are at risk for worse things like heart failure down the line from air pollution exposure? So that’s another thing that I’m interested in. 

In your clinical practice here in the Bay Area, do conversations about climate change come up with your older patients who have cardiovascular diseases?

The climate change issue that I field the most questions about are usually during wildfire seasons. I think part of that has to do with the visibility of it. When it looks like “Blade Runner” outside, the skies look pretty apocalyptic. I think it’s pretty clear to everybody: If you’ve ever tried to go jogging during a bad air quality day, it’s quite apparent that your heart and lungs are not happy with what’s going on. And I have to say most of our patients are also aware of that. I think that’s less of a thought during the extreme heat, because most people don’t immediately connect extreme heat events with heart disease, but I will definitely say I get a lot of questions from patients during wildfire season asking: What does this mean for me? What are the dangers to me? And most importantly, what should I do?

How can healthcare professionals help older people understand the risks of climate change?

We do know that unfortunately, older adults are less mobile and less able to evacuate in times of climate crises. I think one of the saddest statistics I’ve ever heard is that during Hurricane Katrina, over half of the people who died were over the age of 75. That really speaks to the fact that emergency planning has to be done in advance for older adults.  

I know a few of the environmental agencies do in general recommend that people at higher risk for harm from these situations have a disaster response plan. And having these types of disaster management plans is something that we can and should be talking about with our patients, particularly those who live in parts of the country with seasonal emergencies like hurricanes or wildfires or extreme heat waves. I think, as of now, that’s probably something that we as clinicians should be talking about with our older and vulnerable patients that we probably aren’t doing.

While older adults overall are vulnerable to climate change threats, your paper mentioned how those experiencing poverty and structural racism are at greater risk. Could you say more about this?

People who are at a lower socioeconomic status are almost always at higher risk. Part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of current solutions that have to deal with these things involve money, things like air conditioning for heat, and the fact that people who have money and means are more likely to afford higher quality care, so they are less likely to have developed some of these risk factors even if they are the same age as somebody who may be poor. 

In terms of racial, ethnic breakdowns, we’re increasingly recognizing that certain policies, for example, redlining, have marginalized certain groups of people such as African Americans to unfortunately live in parts of cities and communities that may be exposed to higher rates of air pollution — for example, near highways or industrial areas. And as you can imagine, having a higher baseline underlying rate of air pollution exposure means you’re more likely to be injured when there’s a spike in it from something like a wildfire. 

Anything else you wish to add?

I think, moving forward, we shouldn’t take a paternalistic attitude. There are a lot of things that older adults can also offer in the fight against both climate change and climate change-mediated disasters. There’s a certain resilience that you gain from life experiences. 

Also, older adults, a lot of them have this transgenerational thinking, this ability to imagine and advocate for a world for future generations — for their children, for their grandchildren, for their great grandchildren. That, I think, is really powerful. And in many societies, like First Nations societies, elders are quite respected and are important decision makers. Anything that we do in terms of policy, we need to make sure that older adults are equal partners in the decision making, and that we try to leverage their specialized skill sets or their strengths or their worldviews in order to craft our responses to these things, because we’d be surprised at a lot of the strength and resilience that we’ll find from our elders.

This Q&A, the first in a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

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UPDATE 7/29/2022 — The federal government has agreed to allow Laguna Honda Hospital to stop discharging and transferring all patients out of its facility, according to a statement issued by Mayor London Breed on July 28. The announcement came two days after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution urging the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services to suspend an order by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to move all patients out of the hospital. A separate resolution asked Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state health director to stop the transfers. Both resolutions expressed concern that relocating vulnerable patients would cause harm. Federal regulators had previously said they would require Laguna Honda administrators to relocate all patients before they would allow the hospital to apply for recertification needed to receive continued federal funding. Four of the patients recently transferred from Laguna Honda Hospital died soon after being displaced.

Administrators are overhauling policies and procedures to regain federal funding that is set to expire following the issuance of multiple damning inspection reports at Laguna Honda Hospital. They have until Sept. 13 to implement changes, which include a requirement to transfer or discharge all patients, before they can apply for recertification from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — which has the authority to restore funding for patient services. But administrators say they’re struggling to fulfill the centers’ mandate to move out all patients by the looming deadline.

Laguna Honda has room to house more than 700 patients (although as of July 18, occupancy is at 613) and accounts for 34% of all skilled nursing facility beds available in San Francisco. And the hospital’s interim CEO, Roland Pickens, said finding other suitable beds, ones that come with the same level of medical care, has proven to be a near-impossible task. Part of the challenge is finding beds for two distinct populations: those who are typically older and need high-level nursing home care, and those who are not usually elderly but require long-term treatment for psychiatric needs, behavioral disorders and substance abuse problems.

San Francisco’s health department created an online dashboard to show the progress of patient transfers. It shows that Laguna Honda staff are making about 1,500 calls a week searching for open beds. According to the dashboard, as of July 18, 40 patients have been transferred to skilled nursing facilities, and 16 were discharged, three of them to homeless shelters.

The requirement that Laguna Honda move out all patients before seeking recertification is leading some to foresee disaster for patients, their families and for a city already beset by homelessness.

“There’s no way — it’s unthinkable to try to relocate over 700 residents,” said Valoria Russell-Benson, who has worked as a nurse at Laguna Honda for 27 years. “A relocation or to close down Laguna Honda would end up in homelessness for a lot of our residents.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declined an interview request, but in an unsigned statement, wrote that ending a Medicare and Medicaid provider agreement was a last resort. The agency has agreed to continue funding patient care until Sept. 13 as the hospital works toward recertification.

Two consulting firms — Health Management Associates and the Health Services Advisory Group — are helping by conducting mock inspections, according to Dr. Derek Kerr, who worked at the hospital for 10 years. Following his involvement in a successful whistleblower case against the hospital, he became an investigative reporter for the Westside Observer — an online news publication covering San Francisco’s western neighborhoods — and has inside knowledge on activities at Laguna Honda. And full disclosure, he has also donated to the Public Press.

Kerr said the first mock inspection happened in June, and Laguna Honda is correcting deficiencies identified then. San Francisco General Hospital Quality Management staffers have been brought in as well, along with more nurses and more sheriff’s patrols, safety searches and visitor screenings. And narcotic analyzers will check patients when they return to the hospital after brief, permitted excursions.

These measures are meant to address the problem of illicit drug use in the hospital and the presence of contraband among patients. Kerr contends that these problems arose when the Department of Public Health made admissions policy changes in 2004 and introduced a younger population of men — some of them with substance abuse issues.

He said the elderly patients who formerly made up most of the hospital’s population cannot thrive in a “fortified institution” with drug scans, increased police presence and nurses searching patients for contraband.

“Those kinds of constraints are diametrically opposed to what nursing home care should be for elderly patients. They need a completely different model,” he said. “The risk is that you transform the hospital into a carceral complex in order to manage an antisocial subset. So that’s the problem. It might deform the hospital.”

According to a report presented by Pickens, Laguna Honda’s interim CEO, at a San Francisco Health Commission meeting July 19, a second mock survey will occur in August, and in September, the hospital will apply for recertification. If Laguna Honda passes an initial inspection, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will return 90 to 120 days later for a final review. If it passes that test, Laguna Honda could be in the clear by January 2023.

The post Laguna Honda Hospital Has to Self-Destruct to Survive appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The Legacy Film Festival on Aging runs virtually May 24-31.

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen daily at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on 102.5 FM in San Francisco, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Legacy Film Festival Delves Into the Triumphs and Challenges of Aging appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“If you spend enough time around people that are in the end stages of their life, there are things that keep them going. And then there are times when, you know, they lose the will,” Correia said.

One of those things is seeing loved ones, he said. One facility resident he worked with had recently chosen assisted suicide, Correia said, after months of isolation under the pandemic visitation restrictions.

“That was really troubling to me,” Correia said. “Certainly there were medical issues, and he qualified for it. But he had a much stronger will at the beginning of this.”

Advocates have been pushing for the city to ease pandemic-related restrictions on people visiting their loved ones in these facilities for weeks. Their demonstration marked one year since health orders severely restricted visitation as the pandemic took hold in California. It also came a day after the city’s health department had issued an order expanding visitation by removing strict local guidelines and instead aligning with state policy that allows for indoor, in-person visits when they can be done safely. 

Safety requirements include screening any visitor for potential infection, testing and wearing masks. A county’s infection rate “tier” and a facility’s size, staffing and vaccination rate also influence how visitation can occur. Restrictions loosened last fall had until now only allowed for visitors to see residents through a window, from their cars or in some cases outdoors with social distancing. 

“It’s hard because some people don’t have outdoor space. It’s just hard to navigate,” Schneider said. 

Some types of visitation have been allowed from the beginning of the pandemic. The ombudsman has always been allowed to visit facilities, according to the city health department, and “essential visitation” has been allowed under acute circumstances like the end of a resident’s life or for legal requirements. 

While much of Schneider’s contact for many months was virtual, she recently began visiting some facilities. 

“There’s people who have no family at all. And that’s who we also try to focus on a lot, to make sure that they’re getting their needs met, because they don’t really have as much of a voice or the eyes and the ears that the family or other caregivers have,” Schneider said. 

An unsigned statement from the Department of Public Health said Laguna Honda Hospital, the largest skilled nursing facility in the nation, will offer in-person visitation in the coming weeks, as staffing allows. It also noted that the department does not determine how facilities comply with state rules, and is not an enforcement mechanism.

“The San Francisco Department of Public Health is excited that local conditions now support this alignment with the State to allow and encourage individual facilities to safely resume indoor visits,” the statement read. 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Long-Term Care Residents Need Visitation to Thrive, Advocates Say appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

First in line for the vaccine were a few hundred residents of the care facilities that Self-Help for the Elderly operates. When independent seniors became eligible, finding their own appointment online proved an insurmountable barrier for some.

“All the sites are English, for English speakers. Even though they might have a bilingual flyer giving you the information, but when you actually log onto the site, you have to be English speaker and tech savvy,” Chung said. 

And appointments have been going fast, locking out seniors who do not have someone to frequently check vaccine websites for them to schedule an appointment. 

“Unless you have a grandchild who’s very tech savvy and hover over the site for hours for you, seniors that are living alone with no relatives close by, don’t speak English and definitely are not computer literate are really at a loss,” Chung said.

In response to this kind of problem, San Francisco offered walk-in vaccinations to seniors at San Francisco General Hospital, but Chung said the lines there stretched for several blocks. And she stopped sending clients to the mass vaccination site at Moscone Center. 

“I have seniors that gone there, and they totally got lost,” Chung said. “It’s too big inside, it’s very chaotic.”

Meanwhile, community centers operated by Self-Help for the Elderly have been open since summer, serving as hubs for the distribution of meals and other resources. So the organization began working with doctors from All American Medical Group, a San Francisco physicians group serving a majority-Asian population, to begin distributing vaccines to its senior centers. The first doses were administered at Self-Help’s Richmond district center on Monday, where volunteers could offer visitors hot tea or water while they waited. That, combined with staff and physicians who could speak the patients’ language, helped put them at ease, Chung said.   

“They’re familiar surroundings. You have bilingual and bicultural health care and also volunteers,” she said. “It just works.”

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Nonprofit Brings COVID-19 Vaccines to Seniors appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Now, vaccines are arriving in California and doses will be administered at nursing homes soon through a government partnership with pharmacy giants CVS and Walgreens, whose staffs will deliver vaccines to long term care facilities. Eric Dowdy, chief government affairs officer at Leading Age California, an organization representing mostly nonprofit senior care facilities, said the top priority for those planning the vaccine rollout is improving confidence in the vaccine, in part by combating misinformation that fuels mistrust.

“The pipeline, getting the vaccines to the facilities, that’s all going to happen. The supply is going to get ramped up and we’re not going to have issues with the vaccine being available. It’s just a matter of getting people to realize that it’s worthwhile taking, and that they’re not putting their life at risk doing so. And it’s very important. Really, at this point it’s our only way out of this pandemic so it’s crucial that people take this vaccine when it’s offered.”

— Eric Dowdy

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Nursing Homes to Get Vaccines Soon Through Major Pharmacy Chains appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Susan Mizner, who directs the ACLU’s Disability Rights Program, said 1.3 million people live in nursing homes nationwide and 800,000 live in other congregate settings which receive Medicaid or Medicare funding. Many of them, Mizner said, will not be able to cast a ballot privately and without help.  

Mike Dark, an attorney with California Advocate for Nursing Home reform, said coronavirus restrictions on movement in and out of facilities has dramatically changed how residents might participate in the election.  

Ensuring voting access for facility residents is also a racial, disability and economic justice initiative, said Michelle Bishop with the National Disability Rights Network, as the portion of these residents who are people of color has been increasing in the last decade and many residents are placed in facilities because their family’s finances limit their options. 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Senior, Disability Advocates Mobilize to Ensure Care Facility Residents Vote appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Talbot will be speaking at an Institute on Aging event Monday, Oct. 5 at 5:30 p.m.

“Anyone who’s disabled in some way, I hope they take some kind of encouragement and inspiration from my book. Because that’s why I wrote it. I wrote it to say, I got through this, I am getting through this. I have lingering issues. I can’t see straight, I have to wear special glasses, I’m permanently dizzy, I have to walk outside with a cane, I can’t drive. I’m not the man I once was. And at 69 pushing 70 it makes you very aware of your fragility. And I’m also very aware now, in a deeper way, of other people’s fragility.”

— David Talbot

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post David Talbot Reflects on Recovering From Stroke in Latest Book appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“Elders who are isolated are more at risk of victimization. Right now elders are more isolated than they’ve ever been due to the shelter-in-place, and then there’s the economic downturn that we’re facing. And so you’re going to have people who are going to see that there’s an opportunity.” — Shawna Reeves, Institute on Aging

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